What does it take to build passionate teams? - An interview with Vasco Duarte

Key Take-Aways: A passionate team can be recognized by the quality
of the product or service they provide. They create something that
creates value in the world, not just a product.

[...] I would say that you can't look for passion by looking at
the team. When you look at the outcome of their work, at the
quality of the product or services that the team produces, as
seen by their customers, you will know if it's a passionate team.
You will know it because passion exudes in the product, the
outcome or the final deliverable that comes out of a passionate
team. You will see it in the quality of the products that they
produce, and just before we started recording, we were talking
about two different kinds of microphone, right? The one that you
are using right now, which sounds awesome. And another one, which
is driven by what I would call a marketing focused American
company who doesn't understand the use of their technology. […]


Well, it doesn't need to be easy to use, necessarily, it depends
on what kind of product we are talking about. But in the case of
a microphone that is used for recording in a, like for example
the microphone that I'm using, it's used for recording anywhere.
It's not used for recording in a studio, right? So you need to
deal with all kinds of other sound problems. And you see that.
People are actually thinking about how the product is going to be
used, and they transfer that into the product itself. It doesn't
need to be an easy to use product. It can be a very complex, I
don't know, spectrometer, or whatever. It doesn't need to be
something that is easy to use. But it clearly helps the people
using it to solve a real problem that they have. And it does
solve very often in ways that are very hard to replicate, because
they required a lot of passion to develop that kind of a product.
[...] 
In most passionate teams, there is constructive conflict, where
ideas are the focus, not the people.

[…]Well, actually, in my experience, the best teams I worked
with, there's conflict. And sometimes, when you're an outsider,
you might even think that they are fighting with each other, but
they are not. What they are trying to do, the process they are
going through, is this constructive conflict whereby ideas are
the focus of their discussion, not the people. It's not about
your idea vs. my idea. But it's about multiple ideas, and which
one should we try, and how to we develop it, so in the end, out
of those conflicts emerged other ideas that no one in that
meeting or conversation ever thought about before, but they were
developed and further improved with multiple perspectives, and
together as a team, they created something new. So this
constructive conflict is definitely one of the most important
things that I would say you would see in a high-performing or a
passionate team, if you will.[…] 
Passionate teams work in an environment, where diversity can be
expressed. When they argue, they learn, as they have to express
their unstated assumptions.

[…]I would say that a team, if it's more than two people, and
even in two people, that could happen, a team is a complex social
system. And in my experience, you can't remove diversity from a
social system. What you can do is that you can quench it, you can
stop it from emerging. And this is very much done, I'm thinking
about Germany, the country we both lived in, you still live
there. Where the opinion of the boss is always the one that
matters. And that's one way to constrain a social system, in
order to create order, there's a reason for it, but that does not
remove the diversity in those teams, it just stops it from being
expressed. And I would say that in passionate teams, there is an
environment where diversity can be expressed, where it's okay to
disagree, and actually in fact we look for opportunities for
disagreement, not to fight, although it might look like fighting
from the outside, but rather to learn. And when we get into a
discussion and we start arguing even, when we put arguments, then
we learn, because we have to express unstated assumptions that we
had. And we have to listen to other assumptions that may be
different than ours. That's my hypothesis, at least, that you
can't remove diversity from a complex system. You just need to
find ways to let it emerge.[…] 
Passionate teams don’t accept external constraints. They
embrace them and then they change them. They own the way they are
working.

[…]And actually, there's one perhaps another characteristics of a
passionate team, is that they don't accept external constraints,
they embrace, but then they change external constraints. Like for
example, in this particular team that I was working with, we
introduced Scrum. And in Scrum, there's this thing that, you
know, you do the sprint planning in the beginning, and then you
do the planning poker and so on. And this team just stopped
estimating. They took in the Scrum constraint of doing the
planning and the estimation and so on, and then at some point
they decided, hey, this is not useful for us anymore, we'll stop
it. Another thing that they did is that they had the Jira board,
where they had all of the stories that they were working on, and
at some point they said, this is not useful for us, we should use
a physical board. They were collocated, so that was easy for
them, and they started using a physical board. And then later on,
we changed rooms, we went to another room in another part of the
building, and they designed the room themselves. And the room, if
you entered that room, you would say, "These guys are crazy." It
looked totally different from a normal room in that company.
[…] 
The leader of a passionate team is constantly working on
creating the environment that allows the team to express their
creativity and their ingenuity every day.

[…]We have these amazing examples of companies that delegate the
decision about making the customer happy to the lowest level of
the organization, like Nordstrom, the department store, there's a
whole book about it, I think it's called, "Radical Management" by
Steve Denning, where he talks about putting the client first or
the customer first in everything we do. And the way to do that is
to actually delegate the decision making to the fringes of the
organization, because those are the people who are actually in
touch with the "reality" of what it is to work with clients, to
be in front of clients every day when they are at work. So, for
me the role of the leader is someone who enables the people who
do the real work, who solve the real problems in product
development, who develop the real product, to be able to make
decisions. 


Now, what does that mean? In very practical terms, it means that
the product owner is not a person outside the team. I shudder to
think and to hear when people in Scrum say that the product owner
is not a team member. That is the most ridiculous idea I've ever
heard in my career. Of course the product owner is part of the
team. Otherwise, the team has no ownership over the product. By
definition. If you put the product owner outside the team, the
team is just a bunch of lackeys, servants to the product owner.
That makes absolutely no sense. The team is the most creative,
intelligent group to develop the product. So I would say that
leaders need to create the environment, for example making the
product owners part of the team, getting the developers to
actually talk to and interact with customers, real customers.
That kind of actions, that's there for the leader. The leader in
a passionate team is constantly working on creating the
environment that allows the team to express their creativity and
their ingenuity every day.[…] 
Passionate teams do not fall from the sky. They are not an
accident, they are not created by magic tools either. They are
created by constant, daily endeavor, effort and reflection.

[…]Well, so, first of all, I think that you should all read the
blog post that Marc published on the passion model, and hopefully
at some point even the book. But that's not enough. What I would
say is that once you understand the model and once you understand
those characteristics that Marc describes, then it's time to go
back to basics. Passionate teams are created on the day to day
practice of creating amazing, hyper-performing, really passionate
teams. Passionate teams do not fall from the sky. They are not an
accident, they are not created by magic tools either. They are
created by constant, daily endeavor, effort, reflection, just
like the Agile manifesto says.[…]
Additional Material: Books:

Radical Management

Five Dysfunctions Of A Team

Links:

PASSION
Model: http://marcloeffler.eu/2016/09/07/seven-elements-of-highly-passionate-teams/?lang=en

The 5 Dynsfunctions of a
Team: https://www.tablegroup.com/books/dysfunctions

Bio: https://about.me/duarte_vasco

Podcast: http://scrum-master-toolbox.org/

Blog: http://softwaredevelopmenttoday.com/